‘Great Wall of Portland’ Starting to Squeeze Oregon Metropolis

Behind the Great Wall of Portland lies an urban complex under admiring scrutiny by city planners from the Pacific Rim to Poland.

At first glance, it seems like an urban paradise.

The whitecaps of Mt. Hood shine on one of America’s fastest-growing cities, a model of controlled expansion.

At Portland’s core, instead of boarded-up buildings and sterile skyscrapers, there’s the vibrant bustle of humanity.

Across the city and its suburbs are dozens of quaint neighborhoods served by an efficient transit system and an expanding light-rail line.

“My view is that it’s the best system in the country and a great example for the rest of the country,” says Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institute in Washington, author of “New Visions for Metropolitan America.”

“It isn’t perfect, but I use it constantly as an example of the way to go.”

While Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver spread infinitely toward the horizon, planners two decades ago drew a line around Oregon’s largest city--an urban-growth boundary, the Great Wall of Portland.

Inside the wall, development is encouraged, mainly on smaller lots in neighborhood settings. Outside, development is forbidden to protect revered farmlands and forests.

The boundary was established as an outgrowth of Oregon’s landmark land-use legislation of 1973. Through the recession of the 1980s, as Portland’s growth stalled, the boundary was no issue. There was plenty of land available inside the boundary.

But that changed with the economic boom that began early this decade.

Now 1.3 million people live within the boundary, with an additional 500,000 expected in the next 20 years.

“It’s kind of like buying jeans for your kids a few years before they’re going to fit them,” says John Fregonese, head planner at Metro, the one-of-a-kind regional government that orchestrates Portland’s growth.

“Now we’ve definitely grown into the jeans.”

The strain on these Elysian Fields is beginning to show.

The city is getting crowded. Home prices are skyrocketing. Traffic is a headache. Parking rates have zoomed.

Anti-tax crusaders are campaigning to abolish Metro. Other critics say planners are too inflexible and are trying to force people into a condensed, urban lifestyle they do not want.

A statewide vote has scuttled plans for a north-south expansion of the light-rail transit line called MAX, for Metropolitan Area Express, which last year carried 9 million passengers on its 15-mile route from the eastside to downtown. An 18-mile westside extension is nearly finished and should be operating by next year.

Also, a new property tax limit has turned up the pressure on schools, libraries and police.

Still, across the nation and around the world, Portland is seen as a grand example of how to control urban growth.

“I’ve had six Japanese groups come through in the last six months,” Fregonese says. “There was a group from Poland in the other day.”

Seattle, San Diego, Vancouver, B.C., and Madison, Wis., have used Portland as a model for their own attempts to corral growth. But what has worked politically in Oregon is considered too radical in many areas.

“In San Antonio,” Metro Executive Director Mike Burton says, “I’m introduced as the representative of the People’s Republic of Portland.”

In Minnesota, the Legislature approved a bill this year to establish an elected regional council to oversee planning in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but it was vetoed by Republican Gov. Arne Carlson.

Metro, the only elected regional government in the country, is the hammer that forces the three counties and 24 cities that make up the Portland area to cooperate toward a single vision.

They are downsizing the American Dream.

“The three-bedroom, two-bath suburban home was built for a different time,” Fregonese says.

Average lot sizes for homes have dropped from 9,000 square feet in 1989 to 7,400 square feet. Metro wants it whittled to 6,600 square feet by 1999.

Row houses, apartments, town houses and condominiums are proliferating.

The median price of a single-family home in the Portland area has risen from $64,000 in 1989 to $139,900 in 1996. Last year, the National Home Builders Assn. ranked Portland fifth on the list of U.S. cities with the least-affordable housing, behind only San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Salinas, Calif., and Honolulu.

“I can assure you the urban-growth boundary is driving up home prices,” says Don Morisette, a Metro commissioner and prominent Portland home builder. “It’s not the only reason. A strong economy helps. But we’re paying $130,000 to $150,000 an acre for lots. In 1990, we were paying in the low $20,000s.”

Metro’s vision, called the 2040 Framework, scatters 25 town centers across the 360 square miles that make up the metropolitan region. Each town center would be a little downtown with shops and services within walking distance. Many are old neighborhoods from the streetcar days.

In addition, nine regional centers, with more retail stores--often in the form of shopping centers--are to draw shoppers and workers from a wider geographic area.

At the heart of the plan is downtown Portland.

Like many urban centers, it was deteriorating in the early 1970s. Its revitalization can be traced to the decision to tear up a highway along the Willamette River and replace it with what has become Tom McCall Waterfront Park, named for the late governor who remains the patron saint of Oregon’s efforts to preserve its environment.

Two major downtown streets have been blocked off to serve the city’s bus system. The MAX system stretches to the suburb of Gresham in the east and, within the next year or so, it will reach Hillsboro to the west. Two major department stores anchor a strong downtown shopping and entertainment district.

The city enticed developers to build affordable apartments downtown to make sure it wasn’t deserted at workday’s end. Long-term parking spaces are limited--and expensive--to encourage use of mass transit.

In the 1970s, the city rejected a plan to build a freeway through southeast Portland, using the money for mass transit instead.

There have been no serious attempts to build freeways since, a stubbornness that aggravates some Metro critics.

They point to the clogged Sunset Highway that connects downtown Portland with the western suburbs.

“In 1940, there was a four-lane highway planned and the population of Washington County was 40,000,” says Bill Moshofsky of Oregonians in Action, a property rights group. “Now it’s 400,000 and we still have, for the most part, the same four-lane highway. The idea that light rail is going to solve it is simply a stretch.”

Metro commissioners are deciding whether to expand the urban-growth boundary, which now encircles 232,000 acres. Morisette thinks an additional 8,000 to 10,000 acres is needed. Portland Mayor Vera Katz prefers the status quo.

If the boundary is expanded, as many expect, it won’t be by much. The emphasis will remain on building up, not out.

In southeast Portland, the old Belmont Dairy has been transformed into an upscale grocery, card shop, restaurants and 66 apartments.

A few miles away, a vacant lot that would have held eight standard homes is the site of six new row houses, 10 courtyard homes and one duplex.

Portland’s Lloyd District, not long ago a rundown shopping center surrounded by a deteriorating neighborhood, is a showcase along the light-rail line with millions of dollars of new commercial development.

The Great Wall isn’t escape-proof, though. In small cities outside the growth boundary but close enough for a commute, sprawl is alive and well.

Inside the boundary, Metro’s drive toward higher density--crowding more people in--inevitably meets resistance.

On Mt. Scott in the southeast suburbs, residents are fighting a plan to turn a small golf course into a tract of upscale homes. They want it turned into a park.

In Oak Grove, a blue-collar neighborhood just south of Portland, homeowners fought off an attempt to create a cozy town center. In Multnomah Village, people angrily shouted down the city of Portland’s attempt to force dozens of new housing units into the neighborhood.

Even powerful Nike couldn’t steamroll the planners. Its proposal to expand its ultramodern headquarters in suburban Beaverton has been stalled by the city’s unbending requirement for a transit mall, shops and housing.

Fregonese has nightmares that somehow everything will fall apart.

Oregon’s politics have become more conservative, in the Portland suburbs and across the rest of the vast state.

Without Metro, Fregonese warns, each city and county would be free to go its own way. Without the urban-growth boundary, he says, there would be a chaotic dash to strip-mall hell.

Fregonese says Portland is not seeking to be some great model for the rest of the world, but only wants to stay a place where people want to live.

The concept is spreading anyway.

“I think there are 20 or so cities in the next couple of decades that are going to be following along these lines,” Fregonese says, “not because we’re so smart.

“It’s just that it works, and the more people try it, the more people say, ‘This makes sense. This isn’t so hard. This sure is a nicer way to live.’ ”